Is obligatory. Therefore grammatical categories is an important

typological constant of the morphological level.

When comparing the grammatical categories and forms of the English

and Ukrainian languages we identify the following differences: a) the absence

of the morphological categories in one of the compared languages, b) partial

correspondence and c) complete correspondence.

A given grammatical category may have more than one meaning: a basic

meaning and and peripheral meanings. For example, Past Tense has:

• basic meaning: location of a situation prior to the moment of

speaking

• peripheral use: politeness (I just wanted to ask you…).

2.4. Noun and its categories

In the world’s languages, the most usual inflectional categories

of nouns are grammatical number, grammatical case, and

grammatical gender.

Category of Number

In some languages nouns reflect the number of objects to which they

refer. In most of languages the category of number is realised through

the binary opposition Singular vs. Plural. Some languages (sanscrit, Old

Slavonic, Arabic, Hebrew etc.) distinguish objects occurring in pairs by

assigning dual number to the noun, a special grammatical form

denoting two objects. The paradigm of such languages include three

forms: Singular vs. Dual vs. Plural.

Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those

that do not, quantity must be expressed either directly, with numerals, or

indirectly, through optional quantifiers. However, many of these

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languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an

extensive system of measure words. There is a hierarchy among number

categories: no language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no

language has dual without a plural.

A language has grammatical number when its nouns are subdivided into

morphological classes according to the quantity they express, such as:

1. Every noun belongs to a single number class.

2. Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs have different

forms for each number class, and must be inflected to match the number

of the nouns they refer to.

This is the case in English: every noun is either singular or plural (a

few, such as “fish”, can be either, according to context), and at least

some modifiers of nouns – namely the demonstratives, personal

pronouns articles and verbs are inflected to agree with the number of the

nouns they refer to: “this car” and “these cars” are correct, while “*this

cars” or “*these car” are ungrammatical.

English distinguishes two numbers, singular and plural. The former

Is used to indicate singular objects or referents that can be neither

singular nor plural (mass nouns like contemplation). Plural sometimes

refers to singular objects, too, e.g. glasses, so the category is clearly

grammatical and not semantic.

Ukrainian (Russian and Byelorussian) has three numbers singular,

plural, and dual number (двоїна), which is often mixed up with the

plural or replaced by it by many Ukrainians. The nouns express dual

number only in connection with the numeral adjuncts two, three and

four. This number is mostly indicated by stress which differs, as a rule,

from that of the plural form, eg:

Sg. Dual Pl.

берег – (два) ‘береги – бере‘ги

Many modern Indo-European languages show residual traces of the

dual, as in the English language distinctions both vs. all, either vs. any,

twice vs. <number> times (an archaic thrice also exists, meaning “three

times”), and so on.

The declension (declension is an inflectional paradigm of inflection

nouns and adjectives) of noun phrases containing numeral expressions

in Ukrainian, as in other Slavic languages, is subject to complex rules

while English system of number inflections is rather simple. The

productive formal mark for the strong member of the binary opposition

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of number in English (the plural form), is the suffix (-e)s [-z -s,-iz] as

presented in the forms dog :: dogs, clock::clocks, box :: boxes. But there

are also nouns which form their plurals by the archaic suffix -(e)n

(ox/oxen, child/children). Completely allomorphic, i.e. pertaining only

to the English language are some non-productive ways of forming plural

number. One is by way of root vowel interchange (umlaut) as in the

following seven English nouns: foot – feet, tooth – teeth. A few nouns

have in English identical (homonymous) singular and plural forms (e.g.

deer, salmon, means, species, etc.). Standard English presents a large

number of further irregular plurals taken from other languages.

Examples are radius/radii, index/indices, formula/formulae, alga/algae,

and others.

Typologically isomorphic is subcategorization in the class of nouns

into countables and uncountables. The singularia and pluralia nouns

include common in the contrasted languages semantic groups :

Singularia tantum

1. Names of materials (iron, milk, snow; срібло, бруд, пісок, etc.)

2. Collective nouns (brushwood, foliage, leafage, furnitur; білизна,

птаство, etc.)

3. Abstract notions (courage, knowledge, recognitio; відвага,

знання, буття, etc.)

Pluralia tantum

1. Summation plurals (scissors, tongs, trousers; терези, шорти,

окуляри etc.)

2. Nouns denoting remnants after some processes (scraps, leavings, ,

sweepings; висівки, недопитки, помиї, etc.)

3. Geographic names (Athens, the Netherlands, the Andes; Афіни,

Нідерланди, Анди, Бровари, Лубни, Суми, etc.)

4. Nouns having the meaning ”finance and property”(savings,

valuables; заощадження, цінності, etc.)

However there are a lot of nouns not coinciding in the two

languages. Consequently, a number of nouns may have plural meaning

in English and singular meaning in Ukrainian (barracks, goods, police,

arms – казарма, товар/майно, поліція, зброя, etc. and some

Ukrainian plurals (меблі, вершки, дріжджі, дрова, гроші) have

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singularia tantum equivalents in English (furniture, cream, yeast,

firewood, money, etc.). Also, countables in one language may

correspond to uncountables in the other (e.g. the nouns onion, potato are

countable in English while their Ukrainain counterparts are used as

singularia tantum nouns: цибуля - onions, картопля - potatoes). There

are also cases when English countable nouns correspond to pluralia

tantum nouns in Ukrainian (sledge – сані, election - вибори, rake –

граблі). Another important allomorphism is lexicalised plural forms,

which are more frequent in English and almost unknown in Ukrainian,

Cf: custom (C) – звичай, customs (UC Pl) – таможня, мито.

Category of Case

Case is the immanent morphological category of the noun

manifested in the forms of noun declension and showing the relations of

the nounal referent to other objects and phenomena.

Historically, the Indo-European languages had eight morphological

cases, though modern languages typically have fewer, using

prepositions and word order to convey information that had previously

been conveyed using distinct noun forms.

Ukrainian, as a predominently synthetic language, has 7

morphological cases (Nominative, Genetive, Dative, Accusative,